Australian Premium Exchange (APEX) - a mobile programmatic exchangepowered by AppNexus that pools Fairfax and Nine inventory - has formed a partnership with Qantas Loyalty's Red Planet, allowing advertisers to use offline data from 11.5 million consumers to better target and analyse advertising campaigns.
The partnership is part of the next evolution of APEX, which launched as scaled supply of brand-safe mobile inventory last year. Overlaying data and other features is a critical next step for the exchange to build segments, audience insights and analysis into the offering.
The Qantas relationship is the first part of APEX 2.0 with another “two really crucial steps”, APEX CEO Pippa Leary tells AdNews.
One of these steps is real-time bidding and automated forward guarantee, while the “controversial” part could not be disclosed at this stage. This will allow APEX to offer clients advertising in a “premium environment, with zero wastage and full attribution”.
Growing APEX's scale of inventory beyond Fairfax and Nine will proceed after the exchange has been tooled up with all of the features needed to make it a unique market proposition.
Accuracy at scale
Red Planet has 11.5 million active Qantas frequent flyers, which includes 33 million cookies and “a tonne of transactional data” that's accumulated from billions of redeemed points and rewards.
“This allows them to have real accuracy at scale. The other thing we really liked was their sources are really rich and deep and varied and went beyond travel,” Leary said.
Aside from frequent flier travel transactions, Red Planet draws data across a range of Qantas consumer products. This includes travel money card, Qantas cash, an insurance and wellness programme Qantas Assure, food and wine community Qantas Epiqure and small business loyalty programme Qantas Acquire. Red Planet's 100,000 member research panel supplements data with regular insights each month.
On top of Qantas-related data, Red Planet has a relationship with Data Republic, which allows it to tap into shopping basket data from more than 1,600 stores. Data Republic recently partnered directly with Nine.
50 audience segments
All of this data is used to create 50 primary audience segments, although Red Planet will be able to create bespoke segments for specific client needs.
“This data will give us a lot of pre-campaign information, insights we can take to clients about their audience segments. It will also give us rich post-campaign reporting,” Leary added.
“For example, they did some post-campaign reporting for Dymocks and could see how people who saw those advertisements translated into purchases, or closed-loop reporting per retailer. They saw 50% higher open rates on individually targeted campaigns, a 30% lift in sales, and the improvement in click-through rate for the individualised EDM was 418%.”
In a comparison between a Qantas campaign using APEX and a social media platform, there was a 28% higher baseline sales uplift, 51% improvement on cost per acquisition per booking (generated per click), 70% increase in average spend per booking and a 19.3 times higher return on investment, Leary said.
Red Planet segment data will be available via APEX or through the private marketplaces of of Fairfax Media and Nine Entertainment.
“Data partnerships, such as this deal with Red Planet, help us ensure we are able to offer a deep level of consumer insight that advertisers require,” Nine’s chief digital and marketing officer Alex Parsons said.
“It is the combination of world class content, real audiences and deep data that provides us, through partnerships such as APEX, an additional competitive advantage in the ability to communicate to consumers at scale in brand safe environments."
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